Jones Soda

This afternoon I was feeling inspired to shoot some still life photos, but this time I wanted to have reflections in the shots. I got the idea from Strobist and wanted to imitate the shots that he took, and try some that were a little different as well.

If you visit the link to the Strobist website, David Hobby outlines and illustrates how he took his pictures. I did mine following the same basic idea. I had a piece of clear plexiglass sitting on a white table. Under the table is my ghetto speedlite with a wireless remote. Above the table, camera right and almost in-front of the camera is another speedlite (Canon 430 EX) with a softbox.

The speedlite under the table is being fired at a white wall and giving a backlight to the glass bottles. The softbox in-front of the bottles then lights up the front of each bottle.







Click on Read More to see some more set-ups with black backgrounds.

After I got enough of the white background shots, I wanted to try some with a black background. I kept basically the same set-up, but I moved both speedlites to the sides and a little infront of the bottles. I also threw a piece of black fabric under the plexiglass, and behind the bottles. Since my ghetto speedlite doesn't zoom, I ended up putting a snoot on it to control the light fall-off, while my 430 EX was zoomed to 105mm with the softbox taken off.

At this point I tried one more idea, where I moved both speedlites more behind the bottles. I didn't care about exposing the fronts of the bottles, I was going for more of a silhouette look. I also changed this shot to black and white, mostly just for fun, but also because the glass was throwing out some other colours that I didn't like.